Hard Times

Salvador Dalí’s clock,
with its ticking like acid drops,
announces: midnight.
 
This time is a snare,
woven in strange meshes,
a three-dimensional carnival
where democracy pretends to dance.
The minute hand swings
like a pendulum,
obedient to gravity,
unchanging.
 
They dragged a young man
from his home—
into the still night.
Everyone punished,
each according to his labor.
 
Civilization changes,
voices demand change:
“Let us walk, let us roam—
now is the right time.”
But time itself
spins in half-circles,
like a kite in crooked flight.
 
Let this time not change
for politics alone.
In the dark foundations
of this land,
a blood-red future blossoms,
a double-layered snare of hours.
 
A girl raped.
An old man starves on a roadside corner.
A thief tied to a lamppost, beaten.
Migrants torn from villages,
scattered on city pavements.
A girl dressed up, waiting on the street.
A boy, educated, filling forms
on the steps of the GPO.
A farmer’s body hanging
from the branch of a tree.
 
Here, art is defined
as market verse
peddled by a Mozabeb Kabir,
as once in Akbar’s imperial court.
Here, work means flattery;
to keep the household alive
requires a husband’s import.
 
We flowed on,
turning dark times
into unblinking time,
while clock-hands were trapped
in Dalí’s frame—
the present fixed,
nation, kin, and age
all arrested.
 
What greater “liberation”
can this country boast?
 
They arrive in costly cars:
intellectuals, philosophers, leaders.
They preach in press conferences—
where the world must go,
theirs the final authority.
 
Was it not said in Nietzsche’s lesson?
The strong sit in comfortable chairs;
the weak invent morality.
So is written
a grand constitution,
a hymn to state crime
and democracy’s hollow song.
 
“Forward!” they cry,
into the future—
blue-and-white slippers on their feet,
the word honesty pronounced
as deceit.
This is the proud age of progress.
 
And still,
Dalí’s clock ticks,
slow,
merciless—
announcing again:
it is midnight.